Very excited for all that awaits in this next chapter! 🐓🧬🦠 4/4

I’ll be taking inspiration from wild birds and ancient DNA. I’ll also be leading efforts to understand the evolution of Marek’s Disease Virus, which causes a devastating, cancer-causing disease of chickens. 3/4

From Monday, I’m starting at @Pirbright_Inst as an Institue Fellow, building my own research group in Avian Genetics. My work will focus around the genetic resilience of the chicken to viral diseases. 2/4

Today is my last day in @UniofOxford after 14 years, it’s been a blast. 1/4

Last Friday we had 2 amazing talks from @StevenFiddaman and @_MarcoDeMartino. Thanks to all of you who joined us, and to them for their great job. Next month we will have a woolly themed session, with Damla Kaptan and @undeaddandy showing us their results.

Remember that this Friday we have our first #AaRCTikTalks, and that you need to register in order to join. The link can be found in our our webpage: https://t.co/qqmlCRsHsi

Here we have the announcement for the first #AaRCTikTalks! We'll have @StevenFiddaman and @_MarcoDeMartino presenting their research the 26th of April. Registration: https://t.co/r0CdKpR2bo

To kickstart the activity of AaRC, we have organized a seminar series #AaRCTikTalks, which will take place monthly. Here are the first talks!

See our new comprehensive review on natural selection acting in viral sensors in vertebrates:

Studying ancient chickens, researchers in Science reveal the evolutionary history of Marek’s disease virus, which kills >90% of unvaccinated birds. The results shed light on the evolution of virulence in a major disease in modern agriculture. https://t.co/b7ypLgRcyi

🐔🧬Ancient chicken DNA reveals how Marek's disease virus (MDV), a highly contagious poultry pathogen, has evolved to become more virulent. Read the story ➡️ https://t.co/e6DsUVCPOF @LMU_Muenchen @UniofOxford

Ancient DNA reveals how a chicken virus evolved to become more deadly | University of Oxford

Archaeological Marek's disease virus genomes show how this highly virulent chicken virus evolved from an ancestor that was incapable of driving tumor formation @OxfordBiology https://t.co/7Ru3ofXuO3

🚨 Ancient DNA has been used to trace the evolution of Marek's Disease Virus, a chicken disease which has become more deadly in recent history Widespread over 1000 years before being described scientifically, it previously caused much milder symptoms 👇 https://t.co/p58tcNuHnr

Work was done at @OxfordBiology and @school_of_arch at @UniofOxford and @LMU_Muenchen, kindly funded by @ERC_Research, @oxmartinschool @wellcometrust and others. Paper: https://t.co/wVPinlVng4 /end

Thanks for reading. This was a huge team effort in which I was privileged to play a part. Thanks to @dim_antoni99722 @ArchaeOphelie @laduplessis @SophyCharlton @AHaruda @pgflammer @mephitis @AlisonFoster42 @MashkourM @EvolveDotZoo @Greger_Larson @LrFrantz and many more.

This work is just one of many arguments for using #archeological samples, which are relevant not only to our past, but our future too. Never has the need to understand how pathogens evolve been greater: the past contextualizes the present and predicts the future. 14/14

More generally, we found that the genetic changes act like a ratchet – the mutations are almost always acquired in a specific order and once done, are never undone. 13/14

The difference was stark. Ancient Meq was nowhere near as effective as the modern Meq at activation, so was likely unable to drive tumor formation in a living chicken. Marek was right – no tumors in this old form of the disease – and at least partly down to Meq. 12/14

To confirm our suspicions, we resurrected the ancient form of the gene and tested it alongside Meq from modern, virulent MDV in chicken cells. We measured the ability of the protein to transcriptionally activate (turn on) its target genes and orchestrate #tumor formation. 11/14